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A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents
semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
relations between
concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...
s in a network. This is often used as a form of
knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
. It is a
directed Director may refer to: Literature * ''Director'' (magazine), a British magazine * ''The Director'' (novel), a 1971 novel by Henry Denker * ''The Director'' (play), a 2000 play by Nancy Hasty Music * Director (band), an Irish rock band * ''D ...
or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent
concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...
s, and
edges Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed by ...
, which represent semantic relations between concepts, mapping or connecting
semantic field In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically (by meaning) that refers to a specific subject.Howard Jackson, Etienne Zé Amvela, ''Words, Meaning, and Vocabulary'', Continuum, 2000, p14. The term is also used in ...
s. A semantic network may be instantiated as, for example, a
graph database A graph database (GDB) is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the ''graph'' (or ''edge'' or ''relationship''). The graph relat ...
or a
concept map A concept map or conceptual diagram is a diagram that depicts suggested relationships between concepts. Concept maps may be used by instructional designers, engineers, technical writers, and others to organize and structure knowledge. A conc ...
. Typical standardized semantic networks are expressed as semantic triples. Semantic networks are used in
natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
applications such as semantic parsing and
word-sense disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to cons ...
. Semantic networks can also be used as a method to analyze large texts and identify the main themes and topics (e.g., of
social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...
posts), to reveal biases (e.g., in news coverage), or even to map an entire research field.


History

Examples of the use of semantic networks in
logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
, directed acyclic graphs as a mnemonic tool, dates back centuries. The earliest documented use being the Greek philosopher Porphyry's commentary on
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...
's categories in the third century AD. In computing history, "Semantic Nets" for the
propositional calculus Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations ...
were first implemented for computers by Richard H. Richens of the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1956 as an "
interlingua Interlingua (; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the most widely used IALs and is ...
" for
machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...
of
natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languag ...
s, although the importance of this work and the CLRU was only belatedly realized. Semantic networks were also independently implemented by Robert F. Simmons and Sheldon Klein, using the first order
predicate calculus Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: ** Predicate (mathematical logic) ** Propositional function ** Finitary relatio ...
as a base, after being inspired by a demonstration of Victor Yngve. The "line of research was originated by the first President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Victor Yngve, who in 1960 had published descriptions of
algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
for using a
phrase structure grammar The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue ( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in ...
to generate syntactically well-formed nonsense sentences. Sheldon Klein and I about 1962-1964 were fascinated by the technique and generalized it to a method for controlling the sense of what was generated by respecting the semantic dependencies of words as they occurred in text." Other researchers, most notably
M. Ross Quillian ( ; ; pl. ; ; 1512, from Middle French , literally "my lord") is an honorific title that was used to refer to or address the eldest living brother of the king in the French royal court. It has now become the customary French title of respec ...
Quillian, R. A notation for representing conceptual information: An application to semantics and mechanical English para- phrasing. SP-1395, System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, 1963. and others at System Development Corporation helped contribute to their work in the early 1960s as part of the SYNTHEX project. It's from these publications at SDC that most modern derivatives of the term "semantic network" cite as their background. Later prominent works were done by Allan M. Collins and Quillian (e.g., Collins and Quillian; Collins and Loftus Quillian). Still later in 2006, Hermann Helbig fully described
MultiNet Multilayered extended semantic networks (MultiNets) are both a knowledge representation paradigm and a language for meaning representation of natural language expressions that has been developed by Prof. Dr. Hermann Helbig on the basis of earlier ...
. In the late 1980s, two
Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
universities,
Groningen Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...
and Twente, jointly began a project called ''Knowledge Graphs'', which are semantic networks but with the added constraint that edges are restricted to be from a limited set of possible relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph. In the subsequent decades, the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred. In 2012,
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
gave their knowledge graph the name Knowledge Graph. The semantic link network was systematically studied as a semantic social networking method. Its basic model consists of semantic nodes, semantic links between nodes, and a semantic space that defines the semantics of nodes and links and reasoning rules on semantic links. The systematic theory and model was published in 2004. This research direction can trace to the definition of inheritance rules for efficient model retrieval in 1998 and the Active Document Framework ADF. Since 2003, research has developed toward social semantic networking. This work is a systematic innovation at the age of the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
and global social networking rather than an application or simple extension of the Semantic Net (Network). Its purpose and scope are different from that of the Semantic Net (or network). The rules for reasoning and evolution and automatic discovery of implicit links play an important role in the Semantic Link Network. Recently it has been developed to support Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence. It was used for creating a general summarization method. The self-organised Semantic Link Network was integrated with a multi-dimensional category space to form a semantic space to support advanced applications with multi-dimensional abstractions and self-organised semantic links It has been verified that Semantic Link Network play an important role in understanding and representation through text summarisation applications. Semantic Link Network has been extended from cyberspace to cyber-physical-social space. Competition relation and symbiosis relation as well as their roles in evolving society were studied in the emerging topic: Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence More specialized forms of semantic networks has been created for specific use. For example, in 2008, Fawsy Bendeck's PhD thesis formalized the Semantic Similarity Network (SSN) that contains specialized relationships and propagation algorithms to simplify the semantic similarity representation and calculations.


Basics of semantic networks

A semantic network is used when one has knowledge that is best understood as a set of concepts that are related to one another. Most semantic networks are cognitively based. They also consist of arcs and nodes which can be organized into a taxonomic hierarchy. Semantic networks contributed ideas of spreading activation,
inheritance Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Offici ...
, and nodes as proto-objects. One process of constructing semantic networks, known also as co-occurrence networks, includes identifying keywords in the text, calculating the frequencies of co-occurrences, and analyzing the networks to find central words and clusters of themes in the network.


Examples


In Lisp

The following code shows an example of a semantic network in the
Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common ...
using an association list. (setq *database* '((canary (is-a bird) (color yellow) (size small)) (penguin (is-a bird) (movement swim)) (bird (is-a vertebrate) (has-part wings) (reproduction egg-laying)))) To extract all the information about the "canary" type, one would use the assoc function with a key of "canary".


WordNet

An example of a semantic network is WordNet, a lexical database of English. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called
synsets In metadata, a synonym ring or synset, is a group of data elements that are considered semantically equivalent for the purposes of information retrieval. These data elements are frequently found in different metadata registries. Although a group ...
, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. Some of the most common semantic relations defined are meronymy (A is a meronym of B if A is part of B), holonymy (B is a holonym of A if B contains A), hyponymy (or
troponymy In linguistics, troponymy is the presence of a 'manner' relation between two lexemes. The concept was originally proposed by Christiane Fellbaum and George Miller. Some examples they gave are "to nibble is to eat in a certain manner, and to g ...
) (A is subordinate of B; A is kind of B), hypernymy (A is superordinate of B),
synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are al ...
y (A denotes the same as B) and
antonym In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is ''long'' entails that it is not ''short''. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members ...
y (A denotes the opposite of B). WordNet properties have been studied from a
network theory Network theory is the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or asymmetric relations between discrete objects. In computer science and network science, network theory is a part of graph theory: a network can be de ...
perspective and compared to other semantic networks created from Roget's Thesaurus and word association tasks. From this perspective the three of them are a small world structure.


Other examples

It is also possible to represent logical descriptions using semantic networks such as the
existential graph An existential graph is a type of diagrammatic or visual notation for logical expressions, proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote on graphical logic as early as 1882,Peirce, C. S., "n Junctures and Fractures in Logic (editors' title for M ...
s of
Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for ...
or the related
conceptual graph A conceptual graph (CG) is a formalism for knowledge representation. In the first published paper on CGs, John F. Sowa used them to represent the conceptual schemas used in database systems. The first book on CGs applied them to a wide range o ...
s of John F. Sowa. These have expressive power equal to or exceeding standard first-order predicate logic. Unlike WordNet or other lexical or browsing networks, semantic networks using these representations can be used for reliable automated logical deduction. Some automated reasoners exploit the graph-theoretic features of the networks during processing. Other examples of semantic networks are Gellish models.
Gellish English Gellish is an ontology language for data storage and communication, designed and developed by Andries van Renssen since mid-1990s. It started out as an engineering modeling language ("Generic Engineering Language", giving it the name, "Gellish") bu ...
with its Gellish English dictionary, is a
formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of s ...
that is defined as a network of relations between concepts and names of concepts. Gellish English is a formal subset of natural English, just as Gellish Dutch is a formal subset of Dutch, whereas multiple languages share the same concepts. Other Gellish networks consist of knowledge models and information models that are expressed in the Gellish language. A Gellish network is a network of (binary) relations between things. Each relation in the network is an expression of a fact that is classified by a relation type. Each relation type itself is a concept that is defined in the Gellish language dictionary. Each related thing is either a concept or an individual thing that is classified by a concept. The definitions of concepts are created in the form of definition models (definition networks) that together form a Gellish Dictionary. A Gellish network can be documented in a Gellish database and is computer interpretable. SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base for scientific resources. It provides unambiguous identifiers (Research Resource IDentifiers or RRIDs) for software, lab tools etc. and it also provides options to create links between RRIDs and from communities. Another example of semantic networks, based on category theory, is ologs. Here each type is an object, representing a set of things, and each arrow is a morphism, representing a function. Commutative diagrams also are prescribed to constrain the semantics. In the social sciences people sometimes use the term semantic network to refer to co-occurrence networks. The basic idea is that words that co-occur in a unit of text, e.g. a sentence, are semantically related to one another. Ties based on co-occurrence can then be used to construct semantic networks. This process includes identifying keywords in the text, constructing co-occurrence networks, and analyzing the networks to find central words and clusters of themes in the network. It is a particularly useful method to analyze large text and big data.


Software tools

There are also elaborate types of semantic networks connected with corresponding sets of software tools used for lexical knowledge engineering, like the Semantic Network Processing System (
SNePS SNePS is a knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting (KRRA) system developed and maintained by Stuart C. Shapiro and colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo. SNePS is simultaneously a logic-based, frame-based, and network-ba ...
) of Stuart C. Shapiro or the
MultiNet Multilayered extended semantic networks (MultiNets) are both a knowledge representation paradigm and a language for meaning representation of natural language expressions that has been developed by Prof. Dr. Hermann Helbig on the basis of earlier ...
paradigm of Hermann Helbig, especially suited for the semantic representation of natural language expressions and used in several NLP applications. Semantic networks are used in specialized information retrieval tasks, such as plagiarism detection. They provide information on hierarchical relations in order to employ semantic compression to reduce language diversity and enable the system to match word meanings, independently from sets of words used. The Knowledge Graph proposed by Google in 2012 is actually an application of semantic network in search engine. Modeling multi-relational data like semantic networks in low-dimensional spaces through forms of
embedding In mathematics, an embedding (or imbedding) is one instance of some mathematical structure contained within another instance, such as a group that is a subgroup. When some object X is said to be embedded in another object Y, the embedding is giv ...
has benefits in expressing entity relationships as well as extracting relations from mediums like text. There are many approaches to learning these embeddings, notably using Bayesian clustering frameworks or energy-based frameworks, and more recently, TransE ( NIPS 2013). Applications of embedding knowledge base data include
Social network analysis Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of ''nodes'' (individual actors, people, or things within the network) ...
and
Relationship extraction A relationship extraction task requires the detection and classification of semantic relationship mentions within a set of artifacts, typically from text or XML documents. The task is very similar to that of information extraction (IE), but IE a ...
.


See also

* Abstract semantic graph * Chunking (psychology) *
CmapTools CmapTools is concept mapping software developed by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). It allows users to easily create graphical nodes representing concepts, and to connect nodes using lines and linking words to form a ...
*
Concept map A concept map or conceptual diagram is a diagram that depicts suggested relationships between concepts. Concept maps may be used by instructional designers, engineers, technical writers, and others to organize and structure knowledge. A conc ...
* Network diagram *
Ontology (information science) In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domai ...
* Repertory grid * Semantic lexicon * Semantic similarity network * Semantic neural network *
SemEval SemEval (Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. ...
– an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems * Sparse distributed memory *
Taxonomy (general) Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...
* Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) *
Word-sense disambiguation Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to cons ...
(WSD) *
Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...


Other examples

*
Cognition Network Technology Cognition Network Technology (CNT), also known as Definiens Cognition Network Technology, is an object-based image analysis method developed by Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig together with a team of researchers at Definiens AG in Munich, Germany. ...
*
Lexipedia Lexipedia is an online visual semantic network with dictionary and thesaurus reference functionality built on Vantage Learning's Multilingual ConceptNet.G. AdriaensLanguage Engineering Applications: INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND SUMMARIZATION ccl.kul ...
* OpenCog * Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) * Schema.org * SNOMED CT * Universal Networking Language (UNL) *
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain licen ...
* Freebase


References


Further reading

* Allen, J. and A. Frisch (1982).
What's in a Semantic Network
. In: ''Proceedings of the 20th. annual meeting of ACL'', Toronto, pp. 19–27. * John F. Sowa, Alexander Borgida (1991).
Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge
'. * Segev, E. (Ed.) (2022).
Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences
'. New York: Routledge.


External links



by John F. Sowa

by Hai Zhuge {{Authority control Knowledge representation Networks Semantic relations